Today is Earth Day 2019. In The Ethics of Hope, Jürgen Moltmann praised Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of the few "who made the earth the subject of theological thinking"[1] because he "understood the kingdom of God as the 'kingdom of resurrection on earth'"[2]. According to Moltmann, Bonhoeffer followed Christoph Blumhardt's theological thinking, and developed his theology of the earth. 

The Christian hope is also a present and future hope for the earth, and the resurrection will bring about a new earth that is no longer cursed. Grounding our theology of hope in the earth, is essential to having a proper understanding of the New Creation that is and is yet to come. 

I've provided a longer quotation from The Ethics of Hope, wherein Moltmann summarizes Bonhoeffer's theology of the kingdom of resurrection on earth: 

In 1932 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, then curate in Barcelona, held a lecture under the heading ‘Thy kingdom come’, and followed Blumhardt: ‘Only the person who loves the earth and God in one can believe in the kingdom of God.’ Christ . . . does not lead people to a flight from the world into worlds behind the world; he gives the earth back to them as their faithful sons.’ ‘In the hour in which the church prays for the kingdom today, it pledges itself to faithfulness to the earth, to misery, to hunger, to dying.’ Bonhoeffer saw the reason for this faithfulness to the earth in the resurrection of Christ: ‘Here the law of death is shattered; here the kingdom of God itself comes to us, in our world.’

Whereas Christoph Blumhardt spoke out against the neo-pietistic individualist interpretation of salvation, Bonhoeffer protested against the liberal distortion of Christianity into a gnostic ‘religion of redemption’. Both found their way into the biblical realism of the earth when they turned to the message of the Old Testament: ‘Does the question of saving one’s soul ever come up in the Old Testament? Isn’t God’s righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything?’ asked Bonhoeffer when he was in prison.

Writing to Maria von Wedemeyer about their engagement, he wrote: ‘May God give us [faith] daily. I don’t mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures in the world and which loves and remains true to the earth in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage is to be a Yes to God’s earth, it is to strengthen our courage to do and accomplish something on earth.’ Bonhoeffer professed this Yes to the earth at the time when he was facing death because of his resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, at the time, 1944, when German cities had been razed to the ground, and the blood of the murdered Jews cried out to high heaven. [3]

Moltmann concludes that apathy to the rights of the earth, and regards to ecological destruction, hastens the death of all life, and is contrary to the Christian faith:

The important thing today is to live this faithfulness to the earth in the crises in which the manmade catastrophes to the earth are being heralded. The important thing is to prove this faithfulness in the face of the indifference and cynicism with which many people knowingly accept the destruction of the earth’s organism “and foster ecological death.” [4]

For more on Moltmann's doctrine of creation, I recommend reading my article, Jürgen Moltmann on Evolution as God’s Continuous Creation at BioLogos.

Sources:

1. Jürgen Moltmann. Ethics of Hope. trans. Margaret Kohl, Fortress Press, Minneapolis: 2012, 118-9.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Header contains a background image from source: The Blue Marble wikipedia